Of course, spacetime engineering being what it is, maybe the TITANs are still building the gate network (from the perspective of an outside observer at rest) while it looks like a completed giant network from the inside (where going through a gate moves you not just X lightyears in space but X years into the future). Basically, the TITANs sent off gate seeder probes that accelerated outwards, and due to time dilation it looks from the solar system as if we already have connections - it is just that those connections are to the future. In a few decades we will start finding gates much further away, including to distant galaxies and the end of the universe. See http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Tech/Space-Time/wormholes.html for a take on this. However, the ETI explanation makes much more sense anyway. Not that it would necessarily be free from weird time effects either.

If the gates are truly being seeded now and the accessing is in 4 dimensions, then no more gates should appear: all are accesible, no matter the date of their building. Also, all exoplanets have the same duration for time (1 second in the Solar System is 1 second in the exoplanets), or it would have been mentioned. Personally, I bet for the ETI being the ones who seeded the gates (I already said that in another thread about a Pandora Gate on Earth), and they deployed one in the solar system. For me, it's a several waves plan: 1.- Send seeder ships (reference: Stargate Universe) that will travel the galaxy looking for preprogrammed conditions, and then place a gate "seed". Because if I'm smart enought to make a gate that can survive its own overload (ref.: Discord Gate), I'm smart enough to know that the best way to ensure a gate's continous existance is to place a maintenance, self-sustaining nanoswarm hive far away enough to survive the destruction of the gate and rebuild it in case of catastrophic failure. Ok, not the best way, but it's the most simple. 2.- Send 2 stage probes across every new gate. One will gather data of the surroundings, and then go back to the origin point, and the other will stay behind with the "trap" for the singularity effect. 3.- Wait and profit. The Solar System has several gates because the TITANs were not as unified as people think (several degrees of infection, several degrees of resistance, etc...), and maybe some of the gates were prototypes actualyzed lately. I bet the Discord Gate is the original one placed by the ETI, because of the distance to the sun makes it the most hard to reach for local intelligences. Were I the ETI, no gate would have in its "buffer" the directions to reach my planets (home system, main colonies, etc...), and the gates would have some sort of "forum" all gates access and keep updated, where information can be left for the ETI to gather, one forum well hidden so no monkeys can see it. Finally, the TITANS fully expected the rests of transhumanity to access the Pandora Gates' workings. They faced the Prometheans during the Fall, remember? That means they knew of their existence, so it was easy to predict they would help transhumanity to crack the gate's mistery. However, life's a bitch, and no matter if we are playing right into the ETI & TITANs hands, it's X4: Xplore, Xpand, Xploit, Xterminate. I bet the TITANs hope to get an "actualized" version of transhumanity in a while...

I'm of the personal belief that the ETI built the original Pandora Gates, but that the TITANs built the Solar gates based on information contained within the Bracewell probes. Something in the probes motivated the TITANs to leave the Solar system and the gates provided them a method to do it. And I think similar patterns happened in the Fall experiences of other singularity species, like the Iktomi. Which is a pretty convenient way to do it. The ETI seeds space with Bracewell probes for some mysterious purpose and then when a species is intelligent enough to trigger the probes, it also starts a chain of events that networks that area of space into their existing interstellar transportation system.

weaver95 wrote:

which would also further imply that every gate leads to place where some sort of ETI related activity took place. kind of depressing when you think about it.

You want, I could write down my Optimistic version of Eclipse Phase? In that universe everything ends up alright. The TITANs are still dicks, but the ETI are reasonably fluffy.

Y'know, you don't necessarily need another gate to have a wormhole elsewhere. Perhaps the ability to open a wormhole without one strains the gate more, or is just a function transhumanity hasn't unlocked yet, or perhaps it requires that most terrible of weapons: Math. Whatever the case, it's not hard to imagine them creating wormholes to elsewhere, possibly via the gates or another mechanism, and using the gates as a more stable form of travel. Perhaps the gate travel programming comes from the Exsurgent Virus, which is why it's similar with other gates, which are all relics from other previous Singularity events?

There is enough room to decide what suits best any game. After all, we have the Iapetus computronium matrioshka brain that could have been used for almost anything, an indeterminate amount of time between the start of the Fall and the departure of the TITANS, and no clue as to what was their capacities. Yeah, they could have discovered the Gate system by themselves, but I feel that a little... strange. The Fall had the TITANS thieving egos as the banner. So, points: - Bracewell probe turns the TITANS activated at the start of the Fall into somehow hostile to the humanity as a whole. - The TITANS start getting egos from everybody they can, mainly on Earth - The TITANS dissapear with the stolen egos to not be seen again - The Gates are found. If the Bracewell probe made the TITANS ego-thieves, and gave them the coordinates to deliver them (in a faustic pact, most likely), one could ask... Why would the probe not include specs on how to get there? If the Probe did not include data on the gates, but did include the "orders" to the TITANS to gather egos and go someplace, then we can assume two possibilities: 1) The probe reached the Solar System before the gates were built. This can be proved: while dating the gates can be impossible, we can date the surroundings of the sites they are installed (in the different exoplanets, I mean). This also can be used to date the gates in the Solar System, by the way, and decide if there was a gate before the others were built or not. Leaving aside the Discord Gate, of course... 2) The gates were developed by a post-singularity intelligence, and then used by other singularity intellects to quick travel. This would mean that the Bracewell Probe is even more ancient than we can think of, and that all exoplanets were homeworlds, colonies, or targets for further expansion by the civilization that made the gates.

I have a thought on this. Perhaps the reason there are so many gates in the solar system is because the TITANs were testing them out? They found the first one (or were given instructions by the Bracewall probe), and realised they're relatively easy to make if you set things up just right. The TITANs can manufacture them, but even they don't fully understand the physics. But, there's a problem. If you send a probe through to another star, light-years distant, there's no way to tell if your gate's wormhole is "real" or just feeding you perfect simulation data. Easy - you set up a couple of gates close enough to be monitored, but far enough apart that you can be sure (well, as sure as you can) that it will work for interstellar distances. The spacing between planets of one solar system is ideal for this kind of "control" experiment before you go hopping off into something, maybe into a giant simulation run by the ETI. Or, if you want a really wacky explanation, you [i]make extrasolar gates by dialling them up[/i]. As in, all that extra metadata in the gate libraries specifies the locations and dates that you can cause a gate to appear at. You pick a gate listing, hit "Okay" and *bamf!* suddenly one appears at the specified time and location: perhaps right then, perhaps millions of years in the past. However, gate travellers only go through at their closest possible time to their departure, perhaps for energy conservation or timeline continuity reasons.